Blown away by mistakes with fancontrol & pwmconfig

I got myself in pretty deep with what I should have left alone or left up to BIOS to control. Messing with fancontrol / pwmconfig blew way over my head. I had a bit of a problem with one machine after I did a fresh install of focal. It was running fairly quiet in 18.04, and I noticed that it had become a bit too noisy for my taste when I upgraded, so I set off to fix it.

I found myself on this thread: https://askubuntu.com/questions/22108/how-to-control-fan-speed

I went through all the steps in the first answer but after running sudo pwmconfig and going through the steps I was left with my GPU fan rolling at 100% and I was stressing out because I didn't want it to break. The last prompt went something like, "make sure fans are back to normal..." Well I clearly was pushed back by the cyclone that is pwmconfig, and needed an easier way to modify /etc/fancontrol. So I found this GUI to control the fans: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1166768/gui-to-control-fanspeed-in-ubuntu

This was the first thing I ever compiled by myself and it worked, but I was left with a lot of different fans and sensors. I setup some profiles and it seemed to make things more hot and complicated than fresh install. After realizing I may have caused some damage to my system configs regarding fancontrol, I ended up completely removing fancontrol package and the gui I compiled. I heard that tlp was good enough for this sort of task so I installed that package.

Now it seems that whatever I change in the BIOS for certain fans (the exhaust fans on motherboard sys fan headers) I cant seem to get them to react to the temperatures fluctuations the way I set in the BIOS.

Im sorry this is really confusing, not sure what I'm asking here. I guess I'm wondering if I should just backup my /home and reinstall or is there some sort of advice I can get regarding this?

I'm begining to get into crypto mining for a hobby and I noticed that this system's CPU is running really hot while mining compared to another one with similar hardware. Fans are just not doing their job. The other machine can mine in the case with CPU at 45C. This one is running at 65-70C with case open and a desk fan next to it.

IDK maybe sensors are faulty or fans are failing
The temperature is always around 50C while just idle in BIOS, then Ubuntu displays it at 34C when idle. But when I play a game or mine, it gets hotter than I've ever seen it with any version of the OS.

Sorry about the essay. And thanks if you have your 2cents to give.

Is it a laptop or a desktop?

For differences in BIOS and Ubuntu, it could be reading different sensors. One may be for the motherboard and the other CPU. Myself, I'm easily confused knowing what's what.

For differences in OS, it could be CPU frequency scaling or just the kernel drivers for your hardware. I.e. idle devices are still drawing power or CPU is in "performance" mode all the time.

I'm not that familiar with config files for fans and sensors, but if it's "back to normal" when booting to a live session (off a DVD/USB) from power off then some leftover config on your actual installation must be telling the kernel to crank up the performance / fans until the next power down. In which case, a fresh install easiest way out to clear of any residue configs.

For further reading - Arch Wiki has quite the documentation on fan speed control:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fan_speed_control

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Sorry for the delay. It is a desktop. I did end up throwing the towel and reinstalling.
It fixed my issue and fans are quiet. Related to fans, all I installed was lm-sensors and psensor. Things are under control now it seems. I gave myself a headache. I actually replaced the CPU thermal paste and fan, I then realized it was a stock fan with no copper plate(forgot this machine had one of those.) I found one with a bigger heat sink and copper. Idle at around 33C in both BIOS and OS and get to about 50-60C under load. I also overclocked it to 3.2 from 2.8GHz, so things are much better now.

Thanks for the knowledge and link to the reading.

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